Advertising on Facebook is a powerful tool to grow your customer base. In this post we’ll discuss a handy technique in detail: custom audiences.

When you set out to create an ad campaign on Facebook, you’re given a lot of targeting options. Pay attention to these. This can narrow the audience of your ad by age, demographic information, zip codes, cities, gender, hobbies, topics, interests and more.

Unlike mass media, every dollar you spend is sent to customers you pick. You can talk to specifically those who will be more receptive to your message.

Say you have a list of emails of customers. You can upload these into Facebook and connect your ads to their personal profiles. Most people sign up with your newsletter with the same email they use for Facebook. Now you can create ads designed specifically for your current customers, like suggesting upgrades, reviews of past purchases and asking them to like your page.

Facebook allows you to extend your reach to customers that are similar to your chosen audience. Pursuing people who should be your customers – who have similar needs and buying preferences – expands your business to new customers.

Facebook also tracks mobile device information. If you have a list of phone numbers, especially of B2B clients, you can find customers this way, too.

Website traffic can also link you to leads. A snippet of code (a “pixel” in technical terms) copied and pasted into your site shows you dozens of metrics. Visitors to your site who also use Facebook can be served ads directly onto their profiles and newsfeed. This process is known as retargeting.

Media use is also tracked. Users who watch your vides can be divided into groups based on how long they watched it. Should someone watch nearly an entire video but miss the sales pitch at the end, you can send them an ad for the part they missed!

Ultimately, ads on social media follow the same basic principles of all sales. A no is not a no. It just means they don’t have enough information yet. Another ad or coupon can break through to a conversion.

A great feature to spruce up your campaigns is Facebook’s lead form. This form is created right on Facebook and automatically populates as much information as it can. Customers just fill out the little remaining and hit submit. You can also track those who filled out the form but didn’t submit it for some reason.

How do you get into your Facebook marketing account? On the upper right corner of the main Facebook page is an arrow that points down. Click on it and a menu appears. Near the bottom is an option called “Manage Ads.” This takes you to the dashboard.

Social media is a great place to create a positive image of your brand, however, there are some key mistakes businesses make that hurt more than help. First of all, never bash your competition. Focus on positive things about your own business and what great services you have to offer. Don’t be afraid to even take it a step further and join in on constructive conversations with competitors and complimentary businesses. This will make you appear unselfish, involved, and willing to connect with other people, which are all good attributes for your company to have.

Business too often get tunnel vision when it comes to social media and only associate it with marketing. Being truly effective on social media is less about advertising and more to do with creating bonds and connecting with your customers. No one gets on social media to have advertisements shoved down their throat, they come to connect with people and gather information. Therefore, get to know your customers and post content that would appeal to them, and once they feel you as a business care about them, they will be much more welcoming to the advertisements you do post. Try to limit the posts about to your business to only 1/3 of your content. Remember that people use different sites for different reasons so make sure your posts are staying true to the site you’re posting on. Because of this, avoid positing the same thing across multiple platforms. Your posts should be diverse in content and diverse in timing depending on the site you’re using.

Take every opportunity on social media as an opportunity to improve your brand’s image. Never argue with customers, use negative feedback as a learning experience. Respond to that negative feedback quickly and with a willingness to solve the problem. Actions like these will not only show that person you are willing to resolve the issue, but also lets other customers see you’re committed to improving as a business. Customers want to deal with genuine and authentic businesses, therefore, buying followers or likes on your content is never a good idea. Not only does it show a lack of authenticity with customers, but it throws of your analytics completely and doesn’t lead to any, if not less, increase in revenue. Also, the FTC has it’s own set of do’s and don’ts in place for social media, brush up on those to make sure you’re staying legal or lookout for our episode on FTC guidelines.

Pokemon Go is perhaps the biggest news in tech all year. The game implements augmented reality, imposing computer generated images on the real world, thus giving users a real and digital view of the world. As users walk around, they see their character move through a map of the very streets they are walking to catch Pokemon, battle other teams, and create a lot of new foot traffic around businesses.

Upon its release, Pokemon Go shattered App Store records, no game has ever been downloaded so quickly and in such high volumes ever before. And it isn’t just young kids who are downloading. 40% of people who have downloaded the app are ages 24-40, a prime consumer demographic. Therefore, a whole new world has opened up for your business to take advantage of. Embrace the game and involve yourself in it, with this many people playing, a solid percentage of your target audience are bound to be participating.

Let your followers know of rare Pokemon in your area and use in game purchases to attract users to your location. One of the items you can purchase in the game is called a “lure”. These will attract more Pokemon to your location for 30 minutes. And where the Pokemon are the people will head to. For example, a pizza shop spent $10 in lure’s and increased the foot traffic to their location by 70%. Once foot traffic increases around your store, advertise incentives or schedule meet ups for players in your store. The game is already strongly impacting the business world, and it’s only a month old. One of the best tools that are coming is Sponsored stops. These are special stops shown on the game map where a business can advertise their business inside the game. It is worth it for any business to plan for ways to tap in to this new phenomenon that is only set to grow even bigger.

Trevor Hanson, who runs Hanson Media Company, joins us today to discuss his business and share insight as to how to build an effective presence online for videos, primarily through YouTube.

Before you create and post a video the address are these 3 questions:

Who is going to watch it?

Where are they going to land?

What are they going to do?

Once answered, you will not only have the outline for your video, but also be on your way to ensuring the video is as effective and targeted as possible. A video’s effectiveness relies on its ability to reach the target audience, therefore it is vital to research keywords customers in your field are using to derive your titles and tags. By using Google’s Keyword Planner (which is free with a Gmail Account), you can search your topic and it will generate a list of keywords customers have been searching. With that list you now have all keywords you need for your YouTube tags and title. Just keep in mind, the lengthier more specific keywords you find, the more likely it is that you will find exactly the target audience you are looking for.

The more involved with YouTube you are, the more YouTube will help your video reach the top of the search results. So first of all, be sure your profile appears official and provides all necessary information. But on top of that there are some tricks you can use to bump your video up further, such as: linking similar videos to your description and compiling similar videos into a playlist. These show YouTube you want to be active and involved in their service and they will reward you with a higher priority in search results. Finally, always be sure to keep your video focused and to the point, the video should never exceed 4 minutes to keep users interested.